Z
Zealkin
Guest
Read Green by Jay lake, DO NOT READ IT i only did because i have to finish what i start...
Am starting the lies of locke lamora now though :3
Am starting the lies of locke lamora now though :3
What are you reading?
- Thread starter Ⓐaron
- Start date
Cookie Monster
NOM NOM NOM
In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson. It's about the American Ambassador William Dodd, his family, and their experience in Berlin during the rise of Hitler. Fantastic read so far.
Cthulhu
Administrator
- AKA
- Yop
I should get back to finishing FfC or w/e I was reading again and get DwD, 
. Reading random Lovecraft books lately, if I cba to read. It's mostly stuff like shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined condors of purple fulgurous sky, formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion, insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation, etc.
. Reading random Lovecraft books lately, if I cba to read. It's mostly stuff like shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined condors of purple fulgurous sky, formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion, insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation, etc.
Zee
wangxian married
- AKA
- Zee
I should get back to finishing FfC or w/e I was reading again and get DwD,
I have a collection of Lovecraft stuff I devoured just before starting ASoIAF
shit makes me paranoid
especially about drinking water from public sources
Danseru-kun
Pro Adventurer
Just finished reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (can't wait for the movie now!) 
After years of wishing to read the trilogy, I'm finally reading Fellowship of the Ring and after I finish the books I'll watch the extended movies again for the 10th time maybe.
After years of wishing to read the trilogy, I'm finally reading Fellowship of the Ring and after I finish the books I'll watch the extended movies again for the 10th time maybe.
Elisa Maza
Whomst
I posted a long review of Warm Bodies in my Tumblr, if anyone's interested, but I'll c/p here as well.
Okay, let’s get down to it. Remember this post of mine? No? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I first saw the words “Zombie Love Story” I had the reaction my post is showing. Not to mention that the Twilight-esque poster didn’t help my first impressions. Long story short, I hated the premise in a heartbeat.
Twilight is a horrible story both in books and in films, even though the films have TRIED to make some things… less horrible, to their credit. But hey, when the source material is so terrible, there’s so much you can do, right?
When I first saw the poster for Warm Bodies, I immediately thought that Summit had found yet another YA garbage book that had a supernatural romance with horrible writing, a product of a disappointed, middle-aged housewife who thought that could write about her wet dream and make a fortune out of it. You know, like Meyer did.
So, I hunted down the book. It wasn’t easy, since it’s not that popular, but I managed to get an .epub file of it and read it.
So, what is this book? Is it the garbage the movie poster made it be? Is it any different?
Well… it IS different. VERY different. My first clue was the fact that the writer was a man. Now, I’m not saying that men don’t write horrible books. Christopher Paolini is a prime example. He’s a horrible author (or, Suethor, as this awesome community calls inexperienced writers with inflated egos) and his books are Twilight for guys. However, what Marion did was vastly different.
He has something more to say than just a cheesy romance between a living and a supernatural creature. And he touches a very sensitive subject: that death comes in many forms. Not only physically, but also emotionally and mentally.
So, let’s break it down and see why this book, while sounding ludicrous, it actually… works.
By the end of this review, I’d love to read your thoughts as well.
I’ll try my best not to give spoilers.
The premise
Sometime in the future, exact date unstated, the world has gone to hell and returned, obviously in ruins. The human civilization is extinct and the things that remain are ruins, emptiness, silence and undead zombies, or Dead (with D capitalized, as they are referred as in the book) strolling around, hunting down the few remaining Living. In other words, this is a post-apocalyptic world.
In this world we meet our protagonist, a zombie named “R”. He’s dressed in a suit with a red tie, but since he has no memories of the days he was alive, he could be anything before he was turned. The only clue he has is the letter “R”, which could be the letter his name started with. Time passes for him without purpose, without drive. He cannot speak but some gurgled words and he cannot walk straight. His appearance isn’t exactly good, but as he says:
None of us are particularly attractive, but death has been kinder to me than some. I’m still in the early stages of decay. Just the gray skin, the unpleasant smell, the dark circles under my eyes. I could almost pass for a Living man in need of a vacation.
So, he’s decent at best. His age is unstated as well, but he is placed somewhere in his mid-twenties, but he could be eighty and his rotten appearance wouldn’t have changed.
He “lives”, or rather “stays” with many other zombies in an abandoned airport, because the open sky is too vast for them (more on this later). There, we see that time has no meaning for them, they stroll around, growling, until the “feeding” time comes.
Which is… pretty much cliche when it comes to zombies in modern culture, isn’t it?
However, there is a catch with Marion’s zombies: they can think.
Their ability for coherent inner musings isn’t crippled and some of them can think clearly, but they are absolutely unable to express themselves. Like I said above, they cannot speak, so communicating their thoughts is impossible and their bodies are clumsy, so body language is not an option either. So, what does “R” do?
He does nothing for a while. He simply exists in a silent world, he sits, he walks, he stands, he goes to hunt down and eat Living by following the electricity their bodies give out rinse, repeat. There’s a bizarre scene in the first chapter of the book, where a parody of a “wedding” and an “adoption” take place between R and a girl zombie, but it is so weird that it will make you laugh. Do so, because I think that’s what Marion wanted. Also, like the vast sky above, keep it in mind, because I’ll talk about it later.
Now, ludicrous this scene may be, but it does help in something:
It introduces the Bones, that is, the moving skeletons in the airport that seem to “rule” over the zombies, even though they aren’t much different from them in behaviour: they stroll around, but since they have no flesh, they cannot even gurgle.Yet, they seem to hold some “power” over them, in the sense that they are “inspecting” the zombies.
—-
The story
One day, while R and other zombies, along with his “friend” M attack a group of Living who has tried to ambush them.
Now, here’s the second catch with Marion’s zombies: if they bite a Living in any place of his body, they turn them into a zombie as well. However, if they eat the brain, they will get the memories of this Living person. Just like the phrase “my life flashes before my eyes”, this is what happens in the zombies in this book: for a while, they have memories of a life full of sound, taste, human experiences and vivid emotions… but only for a little while, like minutes. After that, the memories fade away and the zombie is left with nothing again.
However, when R eats up the brain of a bitter and suicidal young man, Perry, the memories stay for good. It doesn’t explain how, but as we’ll see later, that’s not so important. Among them, the strongest memory is the one of his girlfriend Julie, who, surprise, surprise, is in the attacked group as well. In a momentous resolution, R, affected by the man’s memories, protects Julie from his kind and takes her to his 747 plane, where he “stays”, until the rest of the zombies, with their incompetent memory, forget her existence and she can leave the place safe.
I guess you can see where this is going, right? Sparks fly, they fall in love, but oh, they are so different, Romeo and Juliet, blah, blah…
No, that’s not it.
—-
The good things
First of all, the supposition that R “loves” and thus saves Julie because of the Perry’s memories doesn’t hold water. There’s something deeper to it. Explaining what exactly is requires explanations for some other things, so bear in mind that this long review will reach its point.
The first good and most important thing you have to understand and remember is that the zombie state in this book is a metaphor for depression.
Taken by helpguide.org, an overly simple definition of depression is
[…] “living in a black hole” or having a feeling of impending doom. However, some depressed people don’t feel sad at all—they may feel lifeless, empty, and apathetic, or men in particular may even feel angry, aggressive, and restless.
Emphasis mine.
The bold part is what R and the rest of the zombies metaphorically have. More than simply a state of supernatural, R literally has no purpose, has no life, has no interests, has no drive, because he has no goal and feels small in an endless world. Yes, the book gives him no heartbeat, he kills people for brains and he doesn’t age, but this is the deal with metaphors: you take something as something else.
Remember the two things I told you I’ll talk about more? Here they are:
There are more examples of how the zombie state in Warm Bodies is a metaphor for depression through the book, but these are enough. Plus, like I said, I’d like to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible.
Now, let’s return to our original purpose. Why doesn’t the thinking that R loves and saves Julie because of Perry’s memories hold water?
Because, more than just the love Perry had for Julie, R for the first time he can remember, has memories of life, living life. He remembers taste, smell, love, hate, joy, sadness, sex, touch, ambition, dreams and communication. In this black haze he exists in, in this no-life he has, in this depression he has, Julie is the only link he has with these memories of life, of colour, of drive and of purpose. No, she herself isn’t the drive and the purpose, but she’s the only familiar face in the memories R gets. So, like someone with perfectly functional eyes finally seeing light after years of living in the darkness, he tries to keep this link alive and meaningful. So, he saves and keeps Julie alive, in a kinda obsessive, but not inexcusable way. Besides, Julie spends time in the middle of a zombie “community”, so she naturally needs protection from the only zombie in the horde who is determined not to harm her.
R’s decision starts a certain change in the status quo the world was in all this time: zombies feed with Living, the Living kill the zombies. For the first time, there’s a contact between these two groups and a peaceful one at that. As any story, things develop from there, but I’ll cut the story here, in fear of spoilers.
The second good thing in this book is the relationship between R and Julie. I’m not kidding. There’s a quote from Meyer on the cover of the book that says that she loved the “romantic lead”. I’ll be a mean bitch and say that if this is what she got out of R and Julie’s relationship, then the woman shows her stupidity. OK, I’m done being a mean bitch.
The thing is, you can hardly describe the relationship between R and Julie as romance, much less as teen romance. In the beginning, Julie is repulsed, shocked and emotionally screwed and understandably so. R, on the other hand, respects her space and simply does whatever necessary to keep her alive and unharmed and that’s it. From awkward to awkward “conversation” (in which R’s vocabulary fails him a LOT), there’s a developing bond forming between the two. It might sound as a sacrilege, but at some point, I had flashes of Pixar’s Wall-E and Eve in the scenes between R and Julie. They aren’t half as light-hearted as in Pixar’s film, of course, but as R shows her that he is capable of more than just existing and killing: he shows that he has collected all sorts of garbage in his 747 plane, from magazines and toys, to dildos and CDs he cannot fathom how to make them work. They are things that simply caught his eye and his crippled interest. He even has a battered car close to his plane that works, even though he has no idea how to drive.
Julie, to find some kind of normalcy, to take her mind off the hopeless and scary situation she’s in, or to simply pass the time, will show and explain how R’s collection items work and even teach him how to drive.
This works. Their relationship almost never goes physical and truthfully, it doesn’t have to. Even though the “romance” aspect of their relationship are scarce and can easily go over your head, their bond and understanding pay up. You believe that they trust and care for each other, you believe they are devoted to a common goal: bringing the world back to life.
And this takes me to the third good thing of this book, the themes.
Marion isn’t a chicken and doesn’t hesitate to bring forward themes that you don’t usually find in YA, like prostitution, ambition, morality, drugs, alcohol and desperation. I’ve talked about depression earlier and while it takes the biggest space in this book, the rest are presented. The world of Warm Bodies is, after all a dystopia where people live from day to day, with no hope for the future and where dreaming is forbidden, frivolities like art and sports and emotions are extinct. But, without them, do the Living actually… live?
What makes a life worth living? Just a beating heart? Or it’s something more, it’s dreams for writing and loving and enjoying sex, food and drink? Gradually, R the Dead zombie with a limp heart and rotten limbs becomes more of a living person than the Living in this book. Where they show desperation, R shows hope and drive and an undeniable thirst to live again.
Again, I won’t give spoilers, but R’s condition improves… more than just his complexion. And not just because he found someone, namely Julie, to love, even though his own feelings for her is an undeniable part of the procedure, but also because he thirsts and hungers for life and everything that brings, more than he hungers and thirsts for Living. It is an unexpectedly positive message and theme in a destroyed world. Hope is found in the most impossible of places and tries to spread and affect both Living and Dead.
—-
The bad things
Because no book is without flaws and Warm Bodies has its share.
Alas, all the above, wonderful as they may sound are presented in a very clumsy, in-your-face way that lacks any shape or form of subtlety. I found myself rolling my eyes more than once at the hand-holding Marion constantly put me through and even got angry at him at some point. It’s not that Marion does the big crime of telling and not showing a lot, even though he does it, but there are some inner musings from R that made me raise an eyebrow. On the one hand, they are obvious from his actions and words. On the other hand, R’s train of thought may start from the universe and end to the Bones in order to present a bigger picture and ideology R is slowly developing. It’s clumsy, inexperienced writing that is too unpolished to simply brush off. Exposition is the order of the day and we swim in unfitting vocabulary. While I can see that R is different from his peers, I don’t need the words like “abomination” and “aesthetic” to get it.
Keep in mind, however, that it cannot be clear-cut purple prose. It borders there, but thankfully, Marion knew when to pull back. He takes his point across successfully and I found the actions of the characters contradicting their thoughts too rarely. In other words, the writing batters the overall impression, but the messages and “what the creator wants to communicate” is still intact.
Also, Marion leaves too many things unexplained. While this can be part of the bigger metaphor and thus, “the power of will and love” is enough in his eyes, he brings up science, magic and God’s will as possible explanations of what these “zombies” exactly are, how this situation started and what the cause is without putting the “blame” on any of the above. In the end, for Marion, the fact that things happened is what is important and not how or why. This can be unsettling for some readers who will try to understand reasons and regulations behind the working of the world of Warm Bodies.
The pacing is another thing Marion needs to work with as well. The scenes with R and Julie could use some extension and even more scenes would be better. Definitely, Marion needs to work in his world-building abilities. While I could tell that the world was destroyed, the image in my head was very unclear. Descriptions of places are bleak, and while it matches R’s POV, it restrains the readers’ imagination. How IS the world, exactly?
And the writing itself is first-person narration. I don’t know if this is a new trend for YA novels, but this POV is far more difficult to write into and Marion needs a lot more work to make it appropriate. It feels dead and while R is a zombie and thus this tone fits him, it doesn’t pass the gradual change he goes into. Long story short, Marion’s writing needs practice and polishing.This was his debut novel and boy, it shows.
If I wanted to describe this book with a phrase, it would be “Decent, but…” It has many problems with the presentation, but the message and the situations can bypass it and reach us. If only the writing would make me cringe.
Twilight is a horrible story both in books and in films, even though the films have TRIED to make some things… less horrible, to their credit. But hey, when the source material is so terrible, there’s so much you can do, right?
When I first saw the poster for Warm Bodies, I immediately thought that Summit had found yet another YA garbage book that had a supernatural romance with horrible writing, a product of a disappointed, middle-aged housewife who thought that could write about her wet dream and make a fortune out of it. You know, like Meyer did.
So, I hunted down the book. It wasn’t easy, since it’s not that popular, but I managed to get an .epub file of it and read it.
So, what is this book? Is it the garbage the movie poster made it be? Is it any different?
Well… it IS different. VERY different. My first clue was the fact that the writer was a man. Now, I’m not saying that men don’t write horrible books. Christopher Paolini is a prime example. He’s a horrible author (or, Suethor, as this awesome community calls inexperienced writers with inflated egos) and his books are Twilight for guys. However, what Marion did was vastly different.
He has something more to say than just a cheesy romance between a living and a supernatural creature. And he touches a very sensitive subject: that death comes in many forms. Not only physically, but also emotionally and mentally.
So, let’s break it down and see why this book, while sounding ludicrous, it actually… works.
By the end of this review, I’d love to read your thoughts as well.
I’ll try my best not to give spoilers.
The premise
Sometime in the future, exact date unstated, the world has gone to hell and returned, obviously in ruins. The human civilization is extinct and the things that remain are ruins, emptiness, silence and undead zombies, or Dead (with D capitalized, as they are referred as in the book) strolling around, hunting down the few remaining Living. In other words, this is a post-apocalyptic world.
In this world we meet our protagonist, a zombie named “R”. He’s dressed in a suit with a red tie, but since he has no memories of the days he was alive, he could be anything before he was turned. The only clue he has is the letter “R”, which could be the letter his name started with. Time passes for him without purpose, without drive. He cannot speak but some gurgled words and he cannot walk straight. His appearance isn’t exactly good, but as he says:
None of us are particularly attractive, but death has been kinder to me than some. I’m still in the early stages of decay. Just the gray skin, the unpleasant smell, the dark circles under my eyes. I could almost pass for a Living man in need of a vacation.
So, he’s decent at best. His age is unstated as well, but he is placed somewhere in his mid-twenties, but he could be eighty and his rotten appearance wouldn’t have changed.
He “lives”, or rather “stays” with many other zombies in an abandoned airport, because the open sky is too vast for them (more on this later). There, we see that time has no meaning for them, they stroll around, growling, until the “feeding” time comes.
Which is… pretty much cliche when it comes to zombies in modern culture, isn’t it?
However, there is a catch with Marion’s zombies: they can think.
Their ability for coherent inner musings isn’t crippled and some of them can think clearly, but they are absolutely unable to express themselves. Like I said above, they cannot speak, so communicating their thoughts is impossible and their bodies are clumsy, so body language is not an option either. So, what does “R” do?
He does nothing for a while. He simply exists in a silent world, he sits, he walks, he stands, he goes to hunt down and eat Living by following the electricity their bodies give out rinse, repeat. There’s a bizarre scene in the first chapter of the book, where a parody of a “wedding” and an “adoption” take place between R and a girl zombie, but it is so weird that it will make you laugh. Do so, because I think that’s what Marion wanted. Also, like the vast sky above, keep it in mind, because I’ll talk about it later.
Now, ludicrous this scene may be, but it does help in something:
It introduces the Bones, that is, the moving skeletons in the airport that seem to “rule” over the zombies, even though they aren’t much different from them in behaviour: they stroll around, but since they have no flesh, they cannot even gurgle.Yet, they seem to hold some “power” over them, in the sense that they are “inspecting” the zombies.
—-
The story
One day, while R and other zombies, along with his “friend” M attack a group of Living who has tried to ambush them.
Now, here’s the second catch with Marion’s zombies: if they bite a Living in any place of his body, they turn them into a zombie as well. However, if they eat the brain, they will get the memories of this Living person. Just like the phrase “my life flashes before my eyes”, this is what happens in the zombies in this book: for a while, they have memories of a life full of sound, taste, human experiences and vivid emotions… but only for a little while, like minutes. After that, the memories fade away and the zombie is left with nothing again.
However, when R eats up the brain of a bitter and suicidal young man, Perry, the memories stay for good. It doesn’t explain how, but as we’ll see later, that’s not so important. Among them, the strongest memory is the one of his girlfriend Julie, who, surprise, surprise, is in the attacked group as well. In a momentous resolution, R, affected by the man’s memories, protects Julie from his kind and takes her to his 747 plane, where he “stays”, until the rest of the zombies, with their incompetent memory, forget her existence and she can leave the place safe.
I guess you can see where this is going, right? Sparks fly, they fall in love, but oh, they are so different, Romeo and Juliet, blah, blah…
No, that’s not it.
—-
The good things
First of all, the supposition that R “loves” and thus saves Julie because of the Perry’s memories doesn’t hold water. There’s something deeper to it. Explaining what exactly is requires explanations for some other things, so bear in mind that this long review will reach its point.
The first good and most important thing you have to understand and remember is that the zombie state in this book is a metaphor for depression.
Taken by helpguide.org, an overly simple definition of depression is
[…] “living in a black hole” or having a feeling of impending doom. However, some depressed people don’t feel sad at all—they may feel lifeless, empty, and apathetic, or men in particular may even feel angry, aggressive, and restless.
Emphasis mine.
The bold part is what R and the rest of the zombies metaphorically have. More than simply a state of supernatural, R literally has no purpose, has no life, has no interests, has no drive, because he has no goal and feels small in an endless world. Yes, the book gives him no heartbeat, he kills people for brains and he doesn’t age, but this is the deal with metaphors: you take something as something else.
Remember the two things I told you I’ll talk about more? Here they are:
- R gets “married” and “adopts” two zombie kids in a ridiculous parody of their real counterparts and
- The zombies feel it necessary to have a roof over their head, because the open sky is too terrifying for them.
- Marriage and having kids are both big decisions one takes in their life. Being tied up to another person by choice, custom and witness of the world and having the huge responsibility to raise children turn our worlds upside down. However, these so important moments in the first chapter of the book are decisions taken without thinking, without ANY emotional impact, without any of them meaning anything at all. This is what also depression does to people: it robs them from meaning, hope and drive and leaves them in the absence of hope, without purpose and in a prospect of a bleak future. R gets married and has kids. So what? He doesn’t feel anything. He’s dead and yes, he IS dead literally, but he still sees, walks and thinks. Yet, he finds no meaning and purpose. Just like as if he had depression (minus the smell and feeding habits).
- One symptoms of depression is feeling that the world is “too much”, that it is vast and you feel too small and helpless. The huge world scares you and you prefer spaces that enclose you, that feel as small as you. The zombies in this book unconsciously choose to have an airport as their “home”. We see them venturing into bathrooms and R has a 747 as a home of sorts, all places that are at least smaller and give some sort of shape in the environment, on the contrast with the open road and the empty sky. The zombies feel terrified of the huge, seemingly endless sky, so they sought a smaller place.
There are more examples of how the zombie state in Warm Bodies is a metaphor for depression through the book, but these are enough. Plus, like I said, I’d like to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible.
Now, let’s return to our original purpose. Why doesn’t the thinking that R loves and saves Julie because of Perry’s memories hold water?
Because, more than just the love Perry had for Julie, R for the first time he can remember, has memories of life, living life. He remembers taste, smell, love, hate, joy, sadness, sex, touch, ambition, dreams and communication. In this black haze he exists in, in this no-life he has, in this depression he has, Julie is the only link he has with these memories of life, of colour, of drive and of purpose. No, she herself isn’t the drive and the purpose, but she’s the only familiar face in the memories R gets. So, like someone with perfectly functional eyes finally seeing light after years of living in the darkness, he tries to keep this link alive and meaningful. So, he saves and keeps Julie alive, in a kinda obsessive, but not inexcusable way. Besides, Julie spends time in the middle of a zombie “community”, so she naturally needs protection from the only zombie in the horde who is determined not to harm her.
R’s decision starts a certain change in the status quo the world was in all this time: zombies feed with Living, the Living kill the zombies. For the first time, there’s a contact between these two groups and a peaceful one at that. As any story, things develop from there, but I’ll cut the story here, in fear of spoilers.
The second good thing in this book is the relationship between R and Julie. I’m not kidding. There’s a quote from Meyer on the cover of the book that says that she loved the “romantic lead”. I’ll be a mean bitch and say that if this is what she got out of R and Julie’s relationship, then the woman shows her stupidity. OK, I’m done being a mean bitch.
The thing is, you can hardly describe the relationship between R and Julie as romance, much less as teen romance. In the beginning, Julie is repulsed, shocked and emotionally screwed and understandably so. R, on the other hand, respects her space and simply does whatever necessary to keep her alive and unharmed and that’s it. From awkward to awkward “conversation” (in which R’s vocabulary fails him a LOT), there’s a developing bond forming between the two. It might sound as a sacrilege, but at some point, I had flashes of Pixar’s Wall-E and Eve in the scenes between R and Julie. They aren’t half as light-hearted as in Pixar’s film, of course, but as R shows her that he is capable of more than just existing and killing: he shows that he has collected all sorts of garbage in his 747 plane, from magazines and toys, to dildos and CDs he cannot fathom how to make them work. They are things that simply caught his eye and his crippled interest. He even has a battered car close to his plane that works, even though he has no idea how to drive.
Julie, to find some kind of normalcy, to take her mind off the hopeless and scary situation she’s in, or to simply pass the time, will show and explain how R’s collection items work and even teach him how to drive.
This works. Their relationship almost never goes physical and truthfully, it doesn’t have to. Even though the “romance” aspect of their relationship are scarce and can easily go over your head, their bond and understanding pay up. You believe that they trust and care for each other, you believe they are devoted to a common goal: bringing the world back to life.
And this takes me to the third good thing of this book, the themes.
Marion isn’t a chicken and doesn’t hesitate to bring forward themes that you don’t usually find in YA, like prostitution, ambition, morality, drugs, alcohol and desperation. I’ve talked about depression earlier and while it takes the biggest space in this book, the rest are presented. The world of Warm Bodies is, after all a dystopia where people live from day to day, with no hope for the future and where dreaming is forbidden, frivolities like art and sports and emotions are extinct. But, without them, do the Living actually… live?
What makes a life worth living? Just a beating heart? Or it’s something more, it’s dreams for writing and loving and enjoying sex, food and drink? Gradually, R the Dead zombie with a limp heart and rotten limbs becomes more of a living person than the Living in this book. Where they show desperation, R shows hope and drive and an undeniable thirst to live again.
Again, I won’t give spoilers, but R’s condition improves… more than just his complexion. And not just because he found someone, namely Julie, to love, even though his own feelings for her is an undeniable part of the procedure, but also because he thirsts and hungers for life and everything that brings, more than he hungers and thirsts for Living. It is an unexpectedly positive message and theme in a destroyed world. Hope is found in the most impossible of places and tries to spread and affect both Living and Dead.
—-
The bad things
Because no book is without flaws and Warm Bodies has its share.
Alas, all the above, wonderful as they may sound are presented in a very clumsy, in-your-face way that lacks any shape or form of subtlety. I found myself rolling my eyes more than once at the hand-holding Marion constantly put me through and even got angry at him at some point. It’s not that Marion does the big crime of telling and not showing a lot, even though he does it, but there are some inner musings from R that made me raise an eyebrow. On the one hand, they are obvious from his actions and words. On the other hand, R’s train of thought may start from the universe and end to the Bones in order to present a bigger picture and ideology R is slowly developing. It’s clumsy, inexperienced writing that is too unpolished to simply brush off. Exposition is the order of the day and we swim in unfitting vocabulary. While I can see that R is different from his peers, I don’t need the words like “abomination” and “aesthetic” to get it.
Keep in mind, however, that it cannot be clear-cut purple prose. It borders there, but thankfully, Marion knew when to pull back. He takes his point across successfully and I found the actions of the characters contradicting their thoughts too rarely. In other words, the writing batters the overall impression, but the messages and “what the creator wants to communicate” is still intact.
Also, Marion leaves too many things unexplained. While this can be part of the bigger metaphor and thus, “the power of will and love” is enough in his eyes, he brings up science, magic and God’s will as possible explanations of what these “zombies” exactly are, how this situation started and what the cause is without putting the “blame” on any of the above. In the end, for Marion, the fact that things happened is what is important and not how or why. This can be unsettling for some readers who will try to understand reasons and regulations behind the working of the world of Warm Bodies.
The pacing is another thing Marion needs to work with as well. The scenes with R and Julie could use some extension and even more scenes would be better. Definitely, Marion needs to work in his world-building abilities. While I could tell that the world was destroyed, the image in my head was very unclear. Descriptions of places are bleak, and while it matches R’s POV, it restrains the readers’ imagination. How IS the world, exactly?
And the writing itself is first-person narration. I don’t know if this is a new trend for YA novels, but this POV is far more difficult to write into and Marion needs a lot more work to make it appropriate. It feels dead and while R is a zombie and thus this tone fits him, it doesn’t pass the gradual change he goes into. Long story short, Marion’s writing needs practice and polishing.This was his debut novel and boy, it shows.
If I wanted to describe this book with a phrase, it would be “Decent, but…” It has many problems with the presentation, but the message and the situations can bypass it and reach us. If only the writing would make me cringe.
OneWingedDemon
NOT AMUSED
Under the Dome. Just started 
Danseru-kun
Pro Adventurer
Almost halfway through the LoTR: Two Towers. Just finished the Helm's Deep chapter 
Alessa Gillespie
a letter to my future self
- AKA
- Sansa Stark, Sweet Bro, Feferi, tentacleTherapist, Nin, Aki, Catwoman, Shinjiro Aragaki, Terezi, Princess Bubblegum
im in the middle of clash of kings and gosh lets see bran is my baby i love him and i dread all the nasty shit that is inevitably gonna happen to him and how all my babies are going to be tortured and die s i g h
Clicky Person
Pro Adventurer
- AKA
- Nanny Ogg
I'm reading Guards! Guards! Just finished Night Watch and am gonna read Men at Arms next. I've read them all before, but now they're mine so I can read them over and over again.
I've read them all before, but now they're mine so I can read them over and over again.
Dana Scully
Special Agent
- AKA
- YACCBS, Legato Bluesummers, Daenaerys Targaryen, Revy, Kate Beckett, Samantha Carter, Matsumoto Rangiku
Finished Going Bovine by Libba Brey a few days, ago. It's about a 16 year old kid named Cameron who gets Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (the human version of Mad Cow Disease) and goes on an adventure to save the world and his life with his paranoid midget friend Gonzo, a garden gnome that is actually the Norse god Baldur in disguise, and a punk-rocker angel named Dulcie who only Cameron can see.
Awesome, awesome read, it's the kind of book that when you finish you almost feel high on feelings. Plus, lots of hilariousness. Definitely recommend it.
Awesome, awesome read, it's the kind of book that when you finish you almost feel high on feelings. Plus, lots of hilariousness. Definitely recommend it.
Mantichorus
"I've seen enough."
- AKA
- Kris; Mantichorus; Sam Vimes; Neku Sakuraba; Koki Kariya; Hazama; CuChulainn; Yu Narukami; Mewtwo; Rival Silver; Suicune; Kanata; Professor Oak; The Brigadier; VIII; The Engineer
Fabricati diem, punc.I'm reading Guards! Guards! Just finished Night Watch and am gonna read Men at Arms next.
Re-reading Night Watch myself.
Lex
Administrator
Just finished Catching Fire. Read The Hunger Games before that (obviously).
Very very nice. Will start Mockingjay tomorrow. Looking forward to the movie now.
In fact I call for a Hunger Games name theme.I call Cinna
OMG I'm so on board with this. I'll quite happily be Finnick.
I'm not going to spoil you, but I just finished Mockingjay today and I just have to make a thread about it. Now.
Jaqen H'ghar
A man knows.
- AKA
- Sully, Nine, Huntress, Relm Arrowny, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, Jon Snow, Spider-Woman, Jessica Drew, Cissnei
Evan Wright - Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America and The New Face of American War
LOVING IT SO FAR and the HBO series is pretty much spot on to the book
LOVING IT SO FAR and the HBO series is pretty much spot on to the book
Elisa Maza
Whomst
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel by Susanna Clark.
Wow. Just... wow. It's been a long time since I read such a well-written, interesting book!
Wow. Just... wow. It's been a long time since I read such a well-written, interesting book!
Dawnbreaker
~The Other Side of Fear~
On the 16th book of VHD: Tyrant Stars.
Some things don't change ¬_¬
Some things don't change ¬_¬